[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Cornell, JPL, NASA] What if a rock that looked like a jelly donut suddenly appeared on Mars? That’s just what happened in front of the robotic Opportunity rover currently exploring the red planet. The unexpectedly placed rock, pictured above, was imaged recently by Opportunity after […]
Like many people, sometimes when I’m bored, I like to download some pics from the Curiosity mission and look them over. First thing I want to say is that I’m not one of those people that finds something in every picture I look at. I’ve looked over hundreds of pictures from Mars and in 98 […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, MAHLI] What’s in this smooth soil on Mars? In late October, NASA’s robotic Curiosity rover stopped near a place dubbed Rocknest as it continues to explore Gale Crater on Mars. Rocknest is the group of stones seen near the top left of the above image […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Curiosity is on the move across Mars — but where is it going? The car-sized rover’s path after 29 Martian days on the surface is shown on the above map. Curiosity is still almost 300 meters from its first major destination, though, a meeting of different types of terrain […]
The light peak is Mt. Sharp — an eventual destination of the Curiosity rover. … Curiosity’s is already on the move crossing the intermediate gravel field toward an interesting terrain feature named Glenelg. Curiosity has also already started analyzing its surroundings by zapping a nearby rock with its laser to analyze the chemical composition of […]
TO ZOOM, CLICK ON THE IMAGE. When Curiosity first touched down on Mars, Internet pranksters were quick to mock up photographs of alien life on the alien landscape. But it seems NASA has itself captured something very strange on camera, including a strange white light dancing across the horizon of the red planet, and four […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGE, CLICK ON IMAGE] The above image … is a high resolution version of a distant wall of Gale Crater captured by the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars last week. A corresponding true color image exists showing how this scene actually appears on Mars. The robotic Curiosity rover continues to check […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE BELOW] You’ve just landed on Mars and opened your eyes — what do you see? If you’re the Curiosity rover, you see a strange gravelly place with a large mountain in the distance. You’ve landed on target near the edge of 150-km wide Gale Crater, with Mount Sharp on […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Just as it captured the Phoenix lander parachuting to Mars in 2008, the HiRise camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) snapped this picture of the Curiosity rover’s spectacular descent toward its landing site on August 5 (PDT). The nearly 16 meter (51 foot) wide parachute and its payload […]
The truth is that only the United States has had the knowledge and moxie to successfully land a vehicle on Mars. We have now done it seven times, and no other nation has really come particularly close. And with the touchdown of the one-ton and highly sophisticated Curiosity, the U.S. has reached a whole new […]
